RR's spread, the results

I copied this from a post on the espn board and wanted to share it here because because I was really surprised with the numbers. Scoughlin1 is the posters name.

I was very interested to see what Rich Rod did at West Virginia against quality teams. Sure he had a pretty good record but how did he stack up against good teams and coaches. I am really glad the athletic director did his homework!!!!

I looked at the Sagarin Rankings dating back from his first year as head coach at WV. This includes bowl games. You can not count the bowl win from last year since he was not coach. I looked at the rankings at the end of the year because thats a true measure of how good your team was. Just like in the NCAA tourney selection. Its not what the team was ranked at the start of the year but the end that counts. Sagarin is very very close to BCS poll and not every poll is perfect but I just used this one because it was easy to look at past seasons and they have a sortable top 30 and top 10 (W-L)

AGAINST TEAMS RANKED IN THE TOP 10
0-9 YES thats no wins and nine loses.
0-11 if season ended today. Yes spread option is 0-11 vs top 10 under RR

Against teams ranked in the top 30
7-17. Pretty good.
7-21 if season ended today, yes spread option is 7-21 vs top 30 if season ended today.

For everyone who says wait until he gets his own players, well the future looks pretty bright.

But, whatever, the past is prelude to the present; It isn't the actual present. It would be reasonable to parse out the the so called steady state, wherein WVU was straight killing fools once the players fully developed. How long does that take? I submit: 1 senior class (4-5 years).

So check it. Of the 26 losses RR is culpable for at WVU over 7 seasons as head coach, 12 came in his first 2 years, 21 came in the first four and 5 losses came in the last three years. When was the last time Michigan accumulated 5 losses or less over a three year period? (1999 which includes the undefeated season in '97)

Anyway, yesterday sucked and was very disappointing. RR needs to get more out of his players going forward. The conclusion that the spread 'n shred, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can't get it done is stupid. Defense is what is holding us back (still), not offense.

Even with the defense's obvious lack of talent, I really don't blame them for a lot of the mess today. They've done an admirable job for being placed on their own 30 time and time again after a turnover.

It's easy to take a statistic out of context and use it to make someone look bad. A lot of the bad numbers come from 2001 and 2008, when Rodriguez took over teams with talent ill-suited to run his offense. In those years, his teams went 0-8 against the top 30, 0-4 against the top 10. Afterward, the numbers gradually improved at WVU.

If you want a fair picture, look at how RR did year by year, and how much his teams improved, as WVU went from a program with a history of moderate success to a national power. And keep in mind that for most of his tenure at WVU, his recruiting was nowhere near the top 30 nationally. Here's the full breakdown, year by year:

2007: 11-2 overall, 1-1 vs. top 30, 1-0 vs. top 10
WVU beat #5 Oklahoma, lost to #20 S. Florida. (Not sure why the author of the ESPN post discounts the Oklahoma game. WVU ran Rich Rod's offense with all the offensive coaches who followed him to Michigan.)

I think the worst you can say about this resume is that WVU didn't play all that many top opponents during their glory years, and RR only had a limited amount of time to prove he could win at the highest levels. But you could have said the same or worse about any other coach Michigan could have hired. The only coaches who have done better for longer are people like Mack Brown, Urban Meyer, Pete Carroll, and Jim Tressell -- and none of them were eager to make a jump to Ann Arbor.

The jury's still out on Rodriguez and it will be until he wins consistently at the level Michigan expects. But I see nothing about his past record that would indicate he can't reach that level.

Because I'm pretty sure that same spread offense under RichRod finished his last 3 or 4 years ranked in the top ten. Also, the OU game counts, it was his offense, run by his staff. If anyone honestly thinks Bill Stewart is a better coach than Coach Rod, then they are either a WVU fan or had an icepick lobotomy. It is entirely possible both conditions apply.